Digital Government
Nevada approves Utility.com for electric service
The Nevada Public Utilities Commission unanimously approved Utility.com last week to receive a license as an alternate seller of electric service to the state's 900,000 households and small businesses beginning in March 2000.
Digital Government
Meridian Data improves on a great product
With Snap! Server Version 2.0, Meridian has improved upon a product that was great in the first place.
Digital Government
Web helps track down Woodstock vandals
The New York State Police turned to the World Wide Web as a tool to help round up a small group of vandals and looters who came to Woodstock '99 and turned the threeday music festival into a riot. Within hours of posting photos on the Internet, however, the police encountered resistance from an unlikely source: the free press.
Digital Government
GAO finds security lax for federal employees' personal info
Appropriators in the House of Representatives have slashed deeply into the president's budget request for NASA, putting into question funding for agency information technology projects for the next year.
Digital Government
Louisiana launches digital justice system
Louisiana this week said it had launched a statewide digital justice system that integrates livescan fingerprints, an automated fingerprint identification system, digitized mugshots and computerized criminal histories (CCH). The system can return a criminal's true identity just 20 to 30 minutes after booking.
Digital Government
State taps IBM for IT products, services
The State Department this week awarded an $85 million contract to a team lead by IBM Corp. for information technology products and services to support the agency's data processing and communication centers.
Digital Government
E-mail may be key to electronic democracy
Lowly email may be the key to creating an interactive public commons necessary to make electronic democracy work, according to online election evangelist Steven Clift.
Digital Government
Group proposes common licensing rules
A U.S. organization that works to unify state laws today overwhelmingly approved a controversial proposal to adopt common licensing rules for software and other information technology transactions that critics say would hold IT companies hostage to the whims of software vendors.
Digital Government
Feds say Y2K experience aids in cyberdefense
The Senate last week took its first close look at how the expertise and systems being developed to deal with the Year 2000 problem can be used now and in the future against intentional attacks on the nation's infrastructure. Testifying before the Senate Special Committee on the Year 2000 Technology
Digital Government
GAO report: Benefits of Army digitization program uncertain
The Army has not produced conclusive evidence that its $20 billion plan to field dozens of advanced information systems to help soldiers exchange information will make its forces more effective on the battlefield, according to a General Accounting Office report released last week. The report, 'Batt
Digital Government
Intercepts
Although nobody has heard a word from the Interceptor since he set out last week on vacation in his canoe, I'm optimistic that the avid Global Positioning System user took a lesson from one of our joint story endeavors here at Federal Computer Week and affixed a handheld GPS system to the inside of
Digital Government
House calls on DOD to halt SPS rollout
Concerned about the viability of a $326 million automated procurement program, Congress has called on the Defense Department to suspend deployment of any additional hardware, software and networking equipment needed to run the system. Buried deep in the House report on the fiscal 2000 Defense Appro
Digital Government
L.A. lawmaker wants city site to be multilingual
Los Angeles councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski filed a motion Friday directing the city's Information Technology Agency (ITA) to find ways to make Los Angeles World Wide Web site more accessible to the area's nonEnglishspeaking population.
Digital Government
SSA cuts its losses on disability claims system
After earmarking $71 million to develop an automated system for processing disability claims, the Social Security Administration has decided to scrap its original program and salvage half the funding to field a scaledback project, SSA commissioner Kenneth Apfel said last week. SSA originally inten
Digital Government
IBM re-enters storage hunt
IBM Corp. elbowed its way into the enterprise storage market last week, introducing a server product designed to support disk storage for mainframe, Unix and Microsoft Corp. Windows NT platforms. The Enterprise Storage Server, codenamed Shark, puts IBM in headtohead competition with EMC Corp. an
Digital Government
Federal Bytes
DUELING TELCOS. Changes in the telecommunications market during the past couple of years have pitted the longdistance service providers against the local exchange carriers, with each side aiming to establish a presence in the other's market. That hostility may be spilling over into the federal ma
Digital Government
Agency sees reward of management labor
Outsourcing management of the desktop computing environment is proving to have a direct impact on the way the agency uses information technology to support its work force, according to officials at one agency. The Department of Housing and Urban Development's Office of the Inspector General last mo
Digital Government
DriveSavers turns data recovery into a science
Several months ago, Jeffrey Colvin, a senior physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, came into his office after a planned power outage at the agency to discover that somehow he had lost vital data on his computer. Colvin's hope to retrieve the information began to fizzle after he learn
Digital Government
Roster Change
Col. Gregory Premo, deputy director of the Programs and Architecture Office in the Army's Office of the Director of Information Systems for Command, Control, Communications and Computers, last month was assigned to the position of deputy director of operations at the Defense Information Systems Age
Digital Government